A Tale of Two Metroidvanias
25 August 2026
completed
completed
It took me a while to understand why I loved Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night felt kind of grueling to play through. In fact, I liked Super Metroid so much that as soon as I was done, I basically instantly fired up Zero Mission and the thought of playing a (probably better) Castlevania sequel made me recoil. I started playing these because I wanted to play these two foundational games that directly led to two things I loved playing growing up: Metroid Fusion and Aria of Sorrow.
Legitimately I thought I was going crazy. The moment I booted up SotN I was wondering why I took so long to play it. The look of it was just exactly my memories of Aria. It felt like it. Woah. And then very quickly I was going crazy in the other direction. Did I even like Aria? Was that the same game, made by the same people? What was the difference here?
It boils down to the RPG of it all.
SotN's problems are twofold and they both relate back to the RPG mechanics. First, Super Metroid is giving Samus new functionality constantly. She gains verbs. She turns into a little ball. She double jumps. She shoots through walls. She murders everything she jumps into.
Verb gaining in SotN is so much lower for Alucard. You get some things sure. Just like in Metroid, Alucard learns to double jump. He learns to fly (basically space jump). But overall the things you're finding aren't new things to do. They're just number changers. You find a piece of armor. You find a new sword. This leads to scenarios where very frequently you're going through the thrill of exploration to be met with something underwhelming. Oh, I already have a cape better than this one. Hooray I guess?
Missile expansions are the worst loot in Super Metroid and are still pretty fucking great. I always need more missiles. Have you met my friend Ridley? He loves to eat missiles. So many missiles. Directly into his face.
This is where we get to our issue with signposting in SotN (admittedly not an rpg mechanic but I still have beef with it). SotN does such minimal handholding (so too does Super Metroid) but at least your idle poking around is rewarded as Samus. Brute force sweeping on where to go is still rewarding with those Missile Expansions compared to finding a weapon or armor you've long since upgraded past. There's just less of the brute forcing necessary in Super Metroid (maybe some occasional "fuck it we bomb every square inch of this until a block gives way") since the design language is so much more consistent. Metroid gives you color coded doors, it signals which blocks are damaged, it even shows you a symbol for the correct explosive to blow up this block.
The Clock Room has three different things to solve and it doesn't really tell you. You can fly out the top, that's pretty evident. The floor will open if you manage to find the Gold and Silver Ring in two different spots, and worst of all, the upper left statue moves only every other minute to reveal a vital passageway. Nothing tells you this, and the Clock Room is small, with little to do in it. It's not like a player is going to be in there for a minute fighting things and then see it slide open. The PSX version also has a translation error on the rings, they say "Wear in Clock Tower" which is actually a completely different location.
The second way the RPG of it all fails SotN is the fact that you can level up, you can grind, and therefore the developers have no idea how strong you are. This means the early game is attrition hell, getting death by a thousand cuts'd which makes exploration a fucking chore. So many times I'd look around the map, trying to find my next step and then laboriously fight my way over there to find out it was nothing (or essentially nothing) of value. Then I'd sigh and have to figure something else out as I did a lap around the castle for things I missed.
Metroid lets you heal up on the go. A bad room means you might sit around and farm some energy in Metroid. In Castlevania it means a detour to the nearest save room. Samus feels like a wily explorer able to live off of this strange and exotic land whereas Alucard is lost without a GPS, looking for the nearest gas station after slowly watching his tank empty.
Then later, you can just bulldoze through everything without a care. Because SotN cares more about making the uninteresting numbers go up, it manages to have the worst of both worlds at different times in the game. Super Metroid gives you more missiles, but it doesn't make them more powerful. You can still die. You can still miss.
This means I, the player, feel more powerful throughout the game. Yes, they've increased my margin for error, it's harder to run out of energy with this many tanks, I don't have to be as precious with my missile spam, but I'm doing it. It's not the broken weapon doing it for me.
This is why Castlevania was something I felt like I needed a walkthrough to help me finish and also was fine with cheesing the hell out of it with the Alucard Shield/Shield Rod combo. The game felt like it was actively repelling me from it.
Aria of Sorrow does a better (albeit not perfect) job of solving this gap. Souls are usually verbs, they let Soma do new shit. Some of them suck and they're unpredictable to get, but at least they suck in a new and exciting way, like having a different arc on a projectile. You also know once you've gotten it you've ticked it off. There's a Pokemon-like "gotta catch em all" element. Even if it sucks, you get to fill in that box in the souls menu.
Soma also benefits from having more friends who are more willing to help. There is much better signposting in Aria of Sorrow. Arikado, Yoko, Hammer, and Julius are willing to hop in, drop some exposition, and a hint at which way to go. Alucard is mostly on his own aside from a couple of pretty unhelpful chats from Maria.
Of course, Aria doesn't fix everything. There's still the grind and gear equipment issues. It fixes the rewards but not necessarily the numbers.
I haven't played Aria in a few years, so I'm going off memory. It's probably something that deserves a replay here while SotN is fresh in my mind, but it's how I remember it making me feel which in many ways is the most important part. I'm also really interested in testing out Dawn of Sorrow and the other games that came after.